SOURCE: Glover, Michael. “A Force for Good.” Spectator 288, no. 9061 (6 April 2002): 32.

In the following review, Glover offers a positive assessment of Finders Keepers: Selected Prose, noting that Heaney's poetry and criticism “has helped to keep the craft of poetry on the right, tight track.”

Another year, another Heaney, ho-hum. I counted up 20-odd titles on the shelf just now. And this time it's not exactly a new book either. This hefty doorstop [Finders Keepers: Selected Prose] takes in material from three earlier collections of his prose published by Faber over the last three decades: Preoccupations, The Government of the Tongue and The Redress of Poetry. All these books were an appealing mixture of autobiographical reminiscence and literary criticism (the second and third were edited transcriptions of whole series of lectures)—and, unsurprisingly, that's pretty well what the new one is too.

Of course, there's some extra stuff—no self-respecting...